Here is a link to the poem Mid-term Break by Seamus Heaney.

This is poem full of grief and sadness. But interestingly we don’t hear what the speaker is feeling – we are confronted with the grief of various other people throughout the poem. The speaker is perhaps too shocked to understand the reality of what has happened.

This is seen as an autobiographical poem as it relates to a true event that happened to the poet, Seamus Heaney, when he was 14 years old. Heaney was an Irish poet and he wrote this poem some years after the death of his younger brother.

This poem is seen as a lyrical poem as it is relatively short with some musical use of rhythm, and it conveys strong emotions. The rhythm, though, isn’t consistent, which upsets the feel of the poem. This is deliberate on the part of the poet so that the reader feels uncomfortable when reading the poem. The poem consists of seven 3-line stanzas and ends on a one line stanza.

The poem starts by providing the reader with a particular setting. He is sitting ‘all morning in the college sick bay / Counting bells knelling classes to a close.’. The speaker is at school ‘college’ and is sitting in the sick room. We’re unsure why he’s there at first. He’s obviously missing classes as he hears the bells ringing between lessons. Is he sick or isn’t he? In the third line, we realise that, for some reason he’s been waiting for someone to fetch him to take him home. There are some ominous moments in the first stanza. Clearly, he’s been isolated from his classmates for some reason. He uses an onomatopoeic word, ‘knelling’ to describe the ringing of the school bell. This is a reminder of the slow long rings of a church bell, especially when it rings for a funeral. There is alliteration of the ‘c’ sound which is a hard sound. It also seems strange that he is being fetched from school by neighbours and not by his parents.

In the second stanza the speaker arrives home and we realise that something terrible has happened. His father is crying. This is the first deep emotion we are presented with in the poem. Extra information regarding his father’s crying is contained between the dashes ‘– He had always taken funerals in his stride–‘. This shows that his father is usually emotionally strong. This would have been the norm at that time, but this event is so tragic that the speaker’s father is the one crying outside the home, not his mother. This is contrasted to ‘Big Jim Evans’, someone that the speaker knows who tells him that ‘it was a hard blow’. A pun is used here as there are two possible explanations for ‘a hard blow’. It could mean that the tragedy is so terrible that it explains why the speaker’s father is crying. It could also refer to the ‘hard blow’ that we learn about later that killed the speaker’s brother.

As the speaker enters the home he is confronted by the innocence and ignorance of ‘the baby’. The baby ‘cooed and laughed’. Cooing is a lovely onomatopoeic word which is soft and gentle. This is the exact opposite of the sad mood inside the room. The speaker ‘was embarrassed / By old men standing up to shake my hand’. He feels uncomfortable about adult strangers shaking his hand as if he, too, is now the adult in the space. He, after all, is only a child himself, but he now has to take the role of an adult as his father is outside crying. He feels shy and awkward about this response from the people in the room.

The adults use a euphemism to convey their sadness about what has happened. They are ‘sorry for my trouble’ – in other words that are sorry that the speaker’s brother has died (not that we know that yet) but they find it too difficult to express this directly. The fact that he has been away at boarding school for a while is confirmed by ‘Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest’. In other words, he was the oldest child in the family and that he’s been ‘Away at school’. We still don’t know exactly who has died but we are reassured that it isn’t the speaker’s mother as the speaker says, ‘my mother held my hand’. The use of alliteration of the ‘h’ sound shows that the speaker is comforted by this.

Notice the carry-on line (enjambment) from the fourth to the fifth stanza as the speaker’s mother holds his hand ‘In hers’. We are then presented with the mother’s response to the tragedy. Unlike the speaker’s father, she is not crying in this moment. She is angry at what has happened ‘coughed out angry tearless sighs’. This highlights how different people respond to grief. The reader finds out that someone has died when ‘the ambulance arrived / With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.’. The ambulance is arriving to bring the body back to the house. It was common practice at that time for there to be a period of mourning with the body inside the house for people to pay their respects. Notice how the speaker uses the word ‘corpse’ which means ‘dead body’ as if he is somehow emotionally distanced from the body at this moment. The body has been taken away after the accident to clean it up. The nurses have ‘stanched’ – stopped the flow of blood – and cleaned the body up for its return home.

The following morning the speaker finally goes to see the body. The room has candles and snowdrops decorating it as a place of mourning. Snowdrops are flowers that appear in early spring. They are symbolic of young life – rather ironic here as a child has died. The ‘candles soothed the bedside’ is personification as the candles are given the human quality of being able to create a calmer, soothing atmosphere. The speaker sees his brother ‘For the first time in six weeks.’. This is because the speaker was away at boarding school. Sadly, this might be the first time he’s seen him in weeks but it is also the last time he will see him. He observes that his brother is ‘Paler now’ than when he last saw him. The paleness or whiteness of the skin shows that there is no longer life there.

Notice how the speaker continues the description of the body in the next stanza. The only damage that the speaker can see is a ‘poppy bruise’ which he says the body is ‘Wearing … on his left temple’. A poppy is a round, red flower so the poet is using a metaphor to compare the shape and colour of the bruise to a poppy. The reader is now getting some clearer information about the tragedy. The speaker says, ‘He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.’ We learn that the body is a child – it is only four feet – which is small. He has been sleeping in a small bed ‘cot’. He body has ‘No gaudy scars’. ‘Gaudy’ means very bright or showy. The reason for this is that ‘the bumper knocked him clear.’. Finally, the reader finds out that the child was knocked down by a car. The knock by the bumper was so hard (remember the reference to ‘a hard blow’ in the second stanza) that the child suffered no other injuries other than the blow to his temple.

In the final, single stanza line of the poem, the reader is confronted with the final tragic information. ‘A four-foot box’ is repeated from the previous stanza with the additional heart-breaking, ‘a foot for every year.’ The child was only four years old. Notice the alliteration on the ‘f’ sound. The speaker’s brother was an innocent child who died in an instant from a car accident which shows the frailty of life itself.

The title is interesting, giving no hint of the tragedy. For many learners who board at school, they are allocated a mid-term break when they go home and spend time with their family. This is usually a happy family holiday time, an interruption, and then the learners go back to school.

The poet has used this title in an ironic way. Although he is going home during the middle of a school term, it certainly isn’t a happy holiday time. It is a time of grief and tragedy. And life will never be the same for him again.